A Soldier's Secret

The cool March wind whipped the waves into a froth and tangled her hair, making her grateful for the gloves and hat Abigail had knitted her last year. Offshore, the seastacks stood sturdy and resolute against the sea and overhead gulls wheeled and dived in the pale, early morning sky.

It all seemed worlds away from growing up in the high desert valleys of Utah but she loved it here. After four years of living in Oregon, she still felt incredibly blessed to be able to wake up to the soft music of the sea every single day.

Abigail had loved beachcombing in the mornings. She knew every inlet, every cliff, every tide table. She could spot a California gray whale’s spout from a mile away during the migration season and could identify every bird and most of the sea life nearly as well as Sage, who was a biologist and naturalist by profession.

Oh, Anna missed Abigail. She could hardly believe it had been nearly a year since her friend’s death. She still sometimes found herself in By-the-Wind—the book and gift store in town she first managed for Abigail and then purchased from her—looking out the window and expecting Abigail to stop by on one of her regular visits.

I know the store is yours now but you can’t blame anold woman for wanting to check on things now and again, Abigail would say with that mischievous smile of hers.

Anna’s circumstances had taken a dramatic shift since Abigail’s death. She had been living in a small two-room apartment in Seaside and driving down every day to work in the store. Now she lived in the most gorgeous house on the north coast and had made two dear friends in the process.

She smiled, thinking of Sage and Julia and the changes in all their lives the past year. When she first met Sage, right after the two of them inherited Brambleberry House, she had thought she would never have anything in common with the other woman. Sage was a vegetarian, a save-the-planet sort, and Anna was, well, focused on her business.

But they had developed an unlikely friendship. Then when Julia moved into the second-floor apartment the next fall with her darling twins, Anna and Sage had both been immediately drawn to her. Many late-night gabfests later, both women felt like the sisters she had always wanted.

Now Sage was married to Eben Spencer and had a new stepdaughter, and Julia was engaged to Will Garrett and would be marrying him as soon as school was out in June, then moving out to live in his house only a few doors down from Brambleberry House.

Both of them were deliriously happy, and Anna was thrilled for them. They were wonderful women who deserved happiness and had found it with two men she was enormously fond of.

If their happy endings only served to emphasize the mess she had made of her own life, she supposed she only had herself to blame.

She sighed, thinking of Grayson Fletcher and her own stupidity and the tangled mess he had left behind.

She supposed one bright spot from the latest fiasco in her love life was that Julia and Sage seemed to have put any matchmaking efforts on hiatus. They must have accepted the grim truth that had become painfully obvious to her—she had absolutely no judgment when it came to men.

She trusted the wrong ones. She had been making the same mistake since the time she fell hard for Todd Ashman in second grade, who gave her underdog pushes on the playground as well as her first kiss, a sloppy affair on the cheek. Todd told her he loved her then conned her out of her milk money for a week. She would probably still be paying him if her brothers hadn’t found out and made the little weasel leave her alone.

She sighed as Conan sniffed a coiled ball of seaweed and twigs and grasses formed by the rolling action of the sea. That milk money had been the first of several things she had let men take from her.

Her pride. Her self-respect. Her reputation.

If she needed further proof, she only had to think about her schedule for the rest of the day. In a few hours, she was in for the dubious joy of spending another delightful day sitting in that Lincoln City courtroom while Grayson Fletcher provided unavoidable evidence of her overwhelming stupidity in business and in men.

She jerked her mind away from that painful route. She wasn’t allowed to think about her mistakes on these morning walks with Conan. They were supposed to be therapy, her way to soothe her soul, to recharge her energy for the day ahead. She would defeat the entire purpose by spending the entire time looking back and cataloguing all her faults.

She forced herself to breathe deeply, inhaling the mingled scents of the sea and sand and early spring. Since Sage had married and moved out and she’d taken over sole responsibility of Conan’s morning walks, she had come to truly savor and appreciate the diversity of coastal mornings. From rainy and cold to unseasonably warm to so brilliantly clear she could swear she could see the curve of the earth offshore.

Each reminded her of how blessed she was to live here. Cannon Beach had become her home. She had never intended it to happen, had only escaped here after her first major romantic debacle, looking for a place far away from her rural Utah home to lick her wounds and hide away from all her friends and family.

She had another mess on her hands now, complete with all the public humiliation she could endure. This time she wasn’t about to run. Cannon Beach was her home, no matter what, and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

They had walked only a mile south from Brambleberry House when Conan suddenly barked with excitement. Anna shifted her gaze from the fascination of the ocean to see a runner approaching them, heading in the direction they had come.

Conan became increasingly animated the closer the runner approached, until it was all Anna could do to hang on to his leash.

She guessed his identity even before he was close enough for her to see clearly. The curious one-handed gait was a clear giveaway but his long, lean strength and brown hair was distinctive enough she was quite certain she would have figured out it was Harry Maxwell long before she could spy the sling on his arm.

To her annoyance, her stomach did an uncomfortable little twirl as he drew closer. The man was just too darn good-looking, with those lean, masculine features and the intense hazel eyes. It didn’t help that he somehow looked rakishly gorgeous with his arm in a sling. An injured warrior still soldiering on.

She told herself she would have preferred things if he just kept on running but Conan made that impossible, barking and straining at his leash with such eager enthusiasm that Lieutenant Maxwell couldn’t help but stop to greet him.

Maybe he wasn’t quite the dour, humorless man he had appeared the day before, she thought as he scratched Conan’s favorite spot, just above his shoulders. Nobody could be all bad if they were so intuitive with animals, she decided.

Only after he had sufficiently given the love to Conan did he turn in her direction.

“Morning,” he said, a weird flash of what almost looked like unease in his eyes. Why would he possibly seem uncomfortable with her? She wasn’t the one who practically oozed sex appeal this early in the morning.

“Hi,” she answered. “Should you be doing that?”

He raised one dark eyebrow. “Petting your dog?”

“No. Running. I just wondered if all the jostling bothers your arm.”

His mouth tightened a little and she had the impression again that he didn’t like discussing his injury. “I hate the sling but it does a good job of keeping it from being shaken around when I’m doing anything remotely strenuous.”

“It must still be uncomfortable, though.”

“I’m fine.”

Back off, in other words. His curtness was a clear signal she had overstepped.

“I’m sorry. Not my business, is it?”

He sighed. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m a little frustrated at the whole thing. I’m not a very good patient and I’m afraid I don’t handle limitations on my activities very well.”

She sensed that was information he didn’t share easily and though she knew he was only being polite she was still touched that he would confide in her. “I’m not a good patient, either. If I were in your shoes, I would be more than just a little frustrated.”

Some of the stiffness seemed to ease from his posture. “Well, it’s a whole lot more fun flying a helicopter than riding a hospital bed, I can tell you that much.”

They lapsed into silence and she would have expected him to resume his jog but he seemed content to pet Conan and gaze out at the seething, churning waves.

It hardly seemed fair that, even injured as he was and just out of rehab, he didn’t seem at all winded from the run. She would have been gasping for breath and ready for a little oxygen infusion.

“It looks like it’s shaping up to be a gorgeous day, doesn’t it?” she said. “Forecasters are saying we should have clear and sunny weather for the next few days. You picked a great time of year to visit Cannon Beach.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to notice this yet but on one of the bookshelves in the living room, I left you a welcome packet. I forgot to mention it when I stopped to say hello last night.”

“I didn’t see it. What kind of welcome packet?”

“Not much. Just a loose-leaf notebook, really, with some local sightseeing information. Maps of the area, trail guides, tide tables. I’ve also included several menus from my favorite restaurants if you want to try some of the local cuisine, as well as a couple of guidebooks from my store.”

She had spent an entire evening gathering and collating the information, printing out pages from the Internet and marking some of her favorite spots in the guide books. All right, it was a nerdy, overachiever thing to do, she realized now as she stood next to this man who simmered with such blatant male energy.

She really needed to get a life.

Still, he didn’t look displeased by the effort. If she didn’t know better, she would suspect him of being perilously close to a surprised smile. “Thank you. That was…nice.”